User Tag List

+ Reply to Thread
Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread: Liberalism as (De)Sadism

  1. #1
    Points: 665,303, Level: 100
    Level completed: 0%, Points required for next Level: 0
    Overall activity: 84.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialRecommendation Second ClassYour first GroupOverdrive50000 Experience PointsTagger First ClassVeteran
    Awards:
    Discussion Ender
    Chris's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    433316
    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Posts
    197,554
    Points
    665,303
    Level
    100
    Thanks Given
    31,984
    Thanked 80,905x in 54,720 Posts
    Mentioned
    2011 Post(s)
    Tagged
    2 Thread(s)

    Liberalism as (De)Sadism

    Liberalism as (De)Sadism is a review by Patrick J. Deneen of Shulamith Firestone's 1970 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.

    ...This American author - Shulamith Firestone - discerned the ... revolutionary potential in the expansion of humanity’s technological control of our nature, and sought to marry what she regarded as Marx’s hopes and the possibilities arising from liberatory feminism and technological progress. Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex should be required reading - albeit with accompanying cautions - for anyone wishing to understand the deeper currents of our relentlessly revolutionary age.

    In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone sought to achieve a kind of melding of progressivism, Marxism, and scientism - a toxic combination that today is the defining feature of the ruling class who govern the orders of the West. Firestone understood that the Marxist vision of radical equality could never be achieved without first weakening and eventually undoing the existence of the natural family, which, in her view, remained as the last vestige of hierarchy and the human submission to a natural order that should and must come completely under technological control. Stressing the “flexibility of human nature,” Firestone concluded that “unless revolution uproots the basic social arrangements of the biological family…, the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.”

    Firestone understood that nature was a limitation to the attainment of pure human freedom, and even human advances in the control of the external natural world – ones originally advanced in the philosophies of Descartes and Francis Bacon – were insufficient if this control did not extend to the technological control of human nature. The natural differences between the sexes was, for Firestone, the ultimate limitation on equal human liberation, and the very foundation and basis of human society heretofore – the human family – would have to be eliminated for the ends of self-expressive liberation.

    Moreover, Firestone understood more broadly that the overcoming of such natural biological distinctions would require not just the remaking of existing culture, but its outright elimination. Against the views of figures such as Aristotle and Vico, who understood culture to be the working of human civilization alongside and within the boundaries of nature, Firestone believed that culture was a form of limitation and control that constrained the priority of self-expression. She approvingly quoted Friedrich Engel’s claim that “the whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and have hitherto ruled him, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature.” ...The dream of total revolution, wedding the materialist individualism of Locke and the anti-culture of Mill would arrive through technological revolution. In time, this revolutionary project was to be advanced not by Marxism, but capitalism, especially through the liberationist fever dreams of technology corporations....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

  2. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Chris For This Useful Post:

    Common (11-26-2022),RMNIXON (11-26-2022)

  3. #2
    Points: 114,212, Level: 82
    Level completed: 19%, Points required for next Level: 2,438
    Overall activity: 64.0%
    Achievements:
    Social50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    RMNIXON's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    30562
    Join Date
    Sep 2020
    Posts
    30,808
    Points
    114,212
    Level
    82
    Thanks Given
    31,843
    Thanked 30,556x in 17,992 Posts
    Mentioned
    78 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    What bothered me going all the way back to the 70's was the idea that a woman who made a choice to become a mother and run a home was somehow a traitor to the revolution. I don't have a problem with women who want to have a career and advance in the workplace, but what about choices and unnecessary social stigma? This also touches on the abortion issue because you have a great number of responsible women who will never need have a need for an abortion, yet they have allowed the feminists to convince them that abortion is central to other rights and equalities for women. Without that chain yourself to the kitchen stove in bare feet and know that childbirth is an unfair burden not a cause to celebrate.
    My Revenge will be Success! - Donald J Trump

  4. #3
    Points: 665,303, Level: 100
    Level completed: 0%, Points required for next Level: 0
    Overall activity: 84.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialRecommendation Second ClassYour first GroupOverdrive50000 Experience PointsTagger First ClassVeteran
    Awards:
    Discussion Ender
    Chris's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    433316
    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Posts
    197,554
    Points
    665,303
    Level
    100
    Thanks Given
    31,984
    Thanked 80,905x in 54,720 Posts
    Mentioned
    2011 Post(s)
    Tagged
    2 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by RMNIXON View Post
    What bothered me going all the way back to the 70's was the idea that a woman who made a choice to become a mother and run a home was somehow a traitor to the revolution. I don't have a problem with women who want to have a career and advance in the workplace, but what about choices and unnecessary social stigma? This also touches on the abortion issue because you have a great number of responsible women who will never need have a need for an abortion, yet they have allowed the feminists to convince them that abortion is central to other rights and equalities for women. Without that chain yourself to the kitchen stove in bare feet and know that childbirth is an unfair burden not a cause to celebrate.
    That was second-wave feminism. First-wave feminism, going all the way back to suffragettes, were pro-family and pro-motherhood and pro-life. Second-wave, as the sexual revolution set in, turned all that around.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

+ Reply to Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts